Competition on tap for specialists, patients

In the world of health care, competition is nothing new.
And so it is that – in the face of three major expansion projects for each of the region’s three major hospitals – area hospital officials say they aren’t positioning themselves to compete.
Rather, each entity says it is looking to the future needs of the constituency it serves. And instead of focusing on external competitive pressures, each says it is working to be the best.
Gene Haffner, spokesman for Banner Health System, which operates North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley and McKee Medical Center in Loveland, said Northern Colorado already offers plenty in the way of competition for health-care entities.
“Hospitals today, including Banner Health, North Colorado Medical Center, Poudre Valley Hospital, are providers of more than hospital care,” he said. “We are involved in surgery centers. We are involved in home care and medical equipment and rehabilitation services as well as inpatient services. Competition isn’t new to us or to this area. There are many private, for-profit institutions in all of our communities that offer those same services.”
As a result, Haffner said, NCMC’s approach hasn’t changed. “We evaluate how we can be the very best we can be in all areas.”

New hospital rising up
If health-care competition has long existed here, it has increasingly drawn the attention of those outside the industry over the past year as Poudre Valley Health System has moved forward with construction of the $220 million Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland.
PVHS broke ground on the 134-bed hospital April 2. The facility is taking shape on a 70-acre site in the Centerra mixed-use development near the intersection of Interstate 25 and U.S. Highway 34. The hospital is expected to open in 2006.
PVHS, headquartered in Fort Collins, and Regional West Medical Center, an acute-care hospital in Scottsbluff, Neb., will jointly own the facility. Cardiac care – cardiology, surgery and inpatient recovery – along with Level Two trauma care will be specialty areas at MCR.
The hospital will offer medical services supporting those areas, along with a birthing center for labor and delivery, post-partum and well-baby care.
The exponential growth of the region is the catalyst behind Medical Center of the Rockies, said Pam Brock, vice president of marketing and strategic planning for PVHS. Brock said PVHS chose the east Loveland location because “that seemed to be the most appropriate place in that the market that we serve, especially in cardiology and trauma, comes from the region, not from Fort Collins.”
Brock said about 60 percent of PVHS cardiology patients come from outside Fort Collins.
Gary Kimsey, PVHS spokesperson, said the hospital system seeks to serve a region much larger than just Northern Colorado.
“We’re building the hospital to serve a region the size of the state of New York with a population of about 600,000,” he said. “That region stretches into Wyoming, southwestern Nebraska and Western Kansas.”
“That’s a lot of people,” Brock said. “We know they’ll travel because some of them now go to Denver. We know they’ll travel for good health care, and we want to be their provider.”

Major expansion
Meanwhile, North Colorado Medical Center is engaged in a $126 million expansion dubbed the Second Century Project. The expansion will add some 372,000 square feet to the hospital.
Already complete is a 33,000-square-foot emergency department – triple the size of the existing emergency room – and a 731-space parking structure.
The first phase of a 27,000-square-foot cancer center opened in July. A 314,000-square-foot patient-care-services expansion should be finished in late 2005.
When all phases of the Second Century Project are complete, NCMC’s main campus will total more than 1 million square feet, making it the largest health-care facility in Northern Colorado, according to Banner.
Haffner, too, cites growth in Northern Colorado as a catalyst for the expansion at NCMC.
Continued growth in the region must be answered with additional hospital beds. He said the Second Century Project also grows out of the need to update and replace aging facilities while accommodating burgeoning new technologies.
NCMC won’t be brand new when the project is complete, Haffner said. “But, in essence, it is a new hospital on the same campus.”
To the west in Loveland, McKee Medical Center is constructing a 124,000-square-foot, three-story wing. The $80-million expansion project is slated for completion in 2005.
The new wing will include expanded surgical services, new space for information technology and expanded plant services. It adds space for up to 57 new beds. The second floor of the new wing will be devoted to ICU/telemetry, offering specialized services for trauma, medical, surgical and cardiac patients. A third floor will open with 13 new birthing suites. A new glass-and-steel entrance to the existing hospital caps the project.
Like PVHS and NCMC, McKee is preparing for a future pressured by a growing and aging population, said Kathy Harris, interim CEO for the Loveland hospital. The obstetrical unit there is “bursting at the seams,” Harris said, while “our ICU was not effectively able to deal with some of the privacy and more-recent code issues.”
Opinions vary on whether the services offered by the three new and improved hospitals will overlap and just how competition might affect the communities they serve. Identifying and serving the needs in those communities is the larger issue, however, hospital officials say.
Recruiting and retaining employees is a key area in which competition among the three entities is likely to be unavoidable. “The resources in Northern Colorado are finite,” Haffner said. “I am including in that not only the amount of dollars available to pay for care but also the human resources available to provide that care.”
Hundreds of new health-care professionals will be hired in the next few years to staff MCR and the additions to NCMC and McKee.

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